The City Remembers
The man who had been following him since the second week of his investigation introduced himself, when he finally chose to do so, on a Wednesday morning outside the Guild hall, as the city's keeper of what he called the other archive. He was old — very old, Emre thought, in a way that was difficult to place precisely, as though age had reached a plateau beyond which the increments became invisible. He carried a leather case of the kind that architects used for rolled drawings.
He told Emre that the Guild archive was the record of the city's surface, and that there was a second record — older, more complete, held in a different place by people who had been maintaining it for as long as the Guild had been maintaining its own — of what lay beneath. He used the word beneath in a way that Emre gradually realized did not mean below ground but something more like underneath in the sense of fundamental, essential, structurally prior. The city had a plan, he said. Not the plan the architects had drawn or the councils had approved or the guilds had surveyed. An older plan. A plan that the city itself — and here he paused, as though deciding how much of what he believed to say, and then continued — appeared to be returning to.
He showed Emre a map from the leather case. It was old, very old, the parchment brown and cracked at the folds, and the city it showed was the original Meridian —